Carrie Shipers of Lincoln Nebraska is the winner of the 2009 ABZ First Book Poetry Contest for
her book Ordinary Mourning.
Mark Halliday was the judge. Shipers won a prize of $1000.00 and her book will be
published May 1, 2009. She will also receive fifty copies of the book.
Advance comments
Sometimes the dead speak, sometimes the haunted living in
Carrie Shipers's stunningly original new collection, Ordinary Mourning, which takes its title from a Victorian stage of
grief. We readers may find our allies in Shipers’s dead, their voices
compelling, edgy and dry-witted, speaking to keep us alive. “How much
better / than guardian angels, these ghosts who love / the living too much to
let them die?” she asks. Shiver and enjoy the rise of this
accomplished young poet.
Hilda Raz
Ordinary Mourning succeeds in making us feel we have
explored the arena where ghosts meet the living, with Shipers as our alarmingly
cool guide. Rooted in the
conviction that we will all sooner or later need a ghost or two, this is a book
that won’t be easily forgotten—perhaps a haunting book.
Mark Halliday
In her first full-length collection, Ordinary Mourning,
Carrie Shipers writes: “When you lose what you love, you learn to love / the
loss, to guard its ache.” Skating the borders between this realm and the
next, Shipers understands her duty to embrace the dead, telling their stories
with passion and skill.
Dorianne Laux
About the Author
Carrie Shipers received a Bachelor of Arts degree and a
Master of Arts in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Master
of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Ohio State University. In 2010, she completed a Ph.D. in
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her poems and reviews have including Connecticut Review,
Crab Orchard Review,Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, and Prairie
Schooner. She is the author of
two chapbooks, Ghost-Writing (Pudding House, 2007), and Rescue
Conditions (Slipstream, 2008).
Three Poems from Ordinary Mounting Copyright © by Carrie
Shipers
Living Among the Dead
I expected mist or fog drifting, not this hard
Hopper light, a sun I can’t see shining
on and through.
I’d imagined the dead
living in houses, or something like houses,
imagined them having lives—loved ones,
laughter, meals to prepare. Across the plain
I saw a high school classmate who was killed
by a grain auger.
I called his name.
He turned, waved, walked on. I watched
his legs scissor the ground’s slow unfurling,
wondering if he’d forgotten me,
if I’d forgotten some teenage grudge
he’d died holding.
When I caught up to him,
I asked how he was.
All right, I guess.
The weather’s a little dry. He nodded
toward what might have been the horizon.
Have you seen your dad? I asked. Not yet.
I heard he’s here somewhere. If the dead
have ghosts, it must be the living
who haunt them.
A murdered woman called me
by her husband’s name.
I’m not the man
who killed you, I said as gently as I could.
I know, she said. If the dead hunger,
it isn’t for revenge.
Like them,
I have no need to eat, though I’d like
to feel bread tearing between my teeth,
blueberries snapping open on my tongue.
My hands hang useless on their hinges.
There’s little here that can stand our touch.
Copyright © by Carrie Shipers
Visitation
My mother waited years
to tell me: the morning after
my high school graduation,
she found her dead stepfather
eating chocolate cake in the living room.
She said, Good morning.
He nodded and licked blue frosting
from a plastic fork.
She knew
she was awake.
She could hear
the refrigerator’s solemn hum,
birds outside at the feeder.
She wondered how he’d found
his way to a house built five years
after his death, wondered why
her mother hadn’t come—
but the dead deserve their rest.
She drank a glass of water
and went back to bed.
When she got up again,
the evidence—fork, plate, crumbs—
could’ve belonged to anyone.
Copyright © by Carrie Shipers
The Ghosts I Want
If we make our dead the way we make
our lives, I choose ghosts in case
of emergency.
I know their stories:
the racecar driver who swears his dead
father’s hands closed around his ribcage
and pulled him from a flaming crash;
miners who escaped a cave-in
by following the lamp of a co-worker
they’d never met; a woman whose life
was saved by a housecall from a doctor
dead six weeks.
How much better
than guardian angels, these ghosts who love
the living too much to let them die?
Each event ends with evidence
of impossibility: video reveals
the son’s body jerking backward,
nearly falling, as he untangles
burning legs from the steering wheel.
When rescue workers reach him,
he’s standing feet from the flames.
The miners gather on the surface,
every man accounted for except
their savior John, whose death by cave-in
is commemorated on a plaque
outside the shaft.
Fully recovered, the woman
finds the doctor’s daughter emptying
his apartment of everything except
his leather bag, unused for years.
Copyright © by Carrie Shipers